The way the Urban Dragon series was formatted required a lot of hard choices about what moments I showed and what would be lost in between. This is one of those little moments that I never got the chance to sneak in there, between Arkay and Meph sometime during the two-year timeskip before Crusader Non Grata.
Click went the handcuffs. They wouldn’t hold Meph for long, not with all the convenient lockpick-like tools one could find near a dumpster, not with the high visibility of a bloodied man restrained in a back alley like something out of a comic book, but long enough for my needs.
“So.” I hoisted myself onto the dumpster and met his glare with a pleasant smile. “Quick question for you.”
“You can go straight to hell.”
“Which I’m choosing to interpret as, ‘go right ahead, Arkay, I’m all ears’. So I wanted to know, what do you wear to a Catholic award ceremony?”
His glare froze on his face, kept in place out of force of habit. “What?”
“I mean, I’ve attended Mass and all, but it’s not like I was awake during most of it. And you were practically a choir boy, so I figured you’d know.”
“What?”
I swung my legs impatiently, kicking up a rhythm against the side of the dumpster. “Father Gabriel’s being honored by the Archdiocese or whatever, and I wanted to know the dress code.”
“Father Gabriel,” he said slowly.
“Nice guy, talks in sign, still walks with a limp since you dropped a building on him?”
Meph averted his eyes. “You’re never going to let that go.”
“Depends. Are you ever going to quit trying to murder me?”
He didn’t answer. But our conversation hadn’t yet been interrupted by any well-meaning do-gooders, so I had time. Mostly I just sat and swung my legs while Meph fiddled around for potential lockpicks.
When he finally did talk, it was so quiet I barely caught it. “A dress.”
“Hm?”
“You wear a dress. Not the kind you’d wear to a club,” he clarified with a glare. “Skirt past the knees. Sleeves. No bare midriff or tit window.”
I pulled a sharpie out of my boot and made a note on the inside of my arm. “Gotcha. Anything else?”
“I’m going to kill you, you know. One of these days.”
“Someone’s gotta do it, right?” I hopped down from the dumpster and grabbed a twenty dollar bill out of my bra and tucked it into the pocket of his jacket. “Just make sure it’s after next Thursday. I think a murder would kill the mood at Father Gabriel’s big day.”
He grunted and said nothing else as I walked away.
I wondered if I’d see him there. It was a long way to travel for a one-day event, who knew? Maybe he’d want to offer his support.
Stranger things had happened, after all.
JWTroemner.com 
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